Four Quick PowerPoint Hints
~~Kathryn
Jacobs, PowerPointAnswers
This month, I offer four practical tips that
should make using PowerPoint much easier.
Tip One: Animate your masters
For those of you who created presentations with the same animation on each
slide (or most slides), try putting your animations on the master slide
instead of on each slide. It will save you time and effort, and make
changing the presentation later much easier.
PowerPoint XP users can take this one step further. If you only need a set
of animations on certain slides, create a master with that animation
sequence and use it for the slides needing animating. Some users have
reported problems with adding the master animations after the slide is
completed. If you have this problem, create a new slide based on the master
with the animation, then copy your desired content from the existing slide
to the newly created slide. Don't forget to delete the old copy, or you will
have duplicates.
Tip Two: Turn on the outlining toolbar
Would you like to see your outline formatted? Turn on the “Outlining”
toolbar by right clicking in any toolbar and clicking on the word
“Outlining”. The toolbar will appear down the left side of your screen and
allows you to:
• Quickly promote and demote bullets
• Create a summary slide
• See your outline as formatted text, rather than just as the default Arial
text
Tip Three: Create a summary slide
Once you have turned on the Outlining toolbar, you can create summary slides
with the click of this button:
This button will only be active when you are viewing the outline. It will
run through your presentation and create a single slide containing the title
of each slide. However, if it hits a slide without a title, it will stop
processing. (If you don’t want the title to show on a specific slide, create
a title anyway and drag it off the slide.)
For large presentations, you will need to do some formatting to ensure that
the slide is readable. If your presentation is really large, you may find
that you want to create several summary slides, one for each section. Do
this by making copies of the summary slide and adapting each to contain the
content you wish.
Summary slides can easily be turned into clickable index to your
presentation. Select each line of text on the slide and create a hyperlink
from that text to the slide with that title. Summary slides are also useful
for showing how far you are in the presentation.
Tip Four: To make a slide into your desktop wallpaper
The content of any slide within a powerPoint presentation can be turned into
your desktop wallpaper. It doesn't matter whether the slide content is a
picture or text. It is a fairly quick process, involving saving the slide as
a jpeg and then selecting the jpeg file as your wallpaper.
1) From within PowerPoint, save that slide as a jpeg (File --> Save As...
select JPEG)
2) PowerPoint will ask you whether you want to save the whole presentation
or just the current slide. Select current slide.
3) Notice the name that PowerPoint gives the file. Close PowerPoint.
(Optional, leave it open if you have other things to do...)
4) Now, set your background by either:
a) Using Windows Explorer, navigate to that file. Right click on the
file and select Set as Desktop Background.Or b) Right click on your
desktop, select Properties, then click on the Background tab. Click the
Browse button, navigate to the file, click on its title (or thumbnail),
and click open.
Hope you enjoyed this month's quick tips.
Remember, if you have PowerPoint questions, send them in using
this form!
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Kathryn Jacobs,
Microsoft MVP, PowerPoint and OneNote
Get PowerPoint answers at
http://www.powerpointanswers.com
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http://www.onenoteanswers.com/
Cook anything outdoors with
http://www.outdoorcook.com
Kathy is a trainer, writer, Girl Scout, parent, and whatever else there is
time for.
I believe life is meant to be lived. But, if we live without
making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived.
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